An intuitive understanding of Word2vec – an approach to learning word representation

“You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”

– J.R. Firth

This statement, uttered by J. R. Firth in 1957, lies at the very foundation of Word2vec, as Word2vec techniques use the context of a given word to learn its semantics.

Word2vec is a groundbreaking approach that allows computers to learn the meaning of words without any human intervention. Also, Word2vec learns numerical representations of words by looking at the words surrounding a given word.

We can test the correctness of the preceding quote by imagining a real-world scenario. Imagine you are sitting an exam and you find this sentence in your first question: “Mary is a very stubborn child. Her pervicacious nature always gets her in trouble.” Now, unless you are very clever, you might not know what pervicacious means. In such a situation, you automatically will be...